Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

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Date: 08 Aug 2006 23:27:47
From: raggio
Subject: Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

Have any of you also experienced CPU spiking to 100 % when running
Vektor 3? I see it all of the time. i have a 1.5 GHZ Mac mini with
512 MB RAM. Not a powerhouse, but I don't expect CPU to go 100% when
doing permanent analysis.

Many of you suggested I try Sigma in my other thread. Does it also
suffer from CPU spiking? Is there another good program that I should
try besdies these two?

Thanks,
John

Date: 09 Aug 2006 07:55:54
From: jraggio
Subject: Re: Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

David Richerby wrote:
> raggio <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Have any of you also experienced CPU spiking to 100 % when running
> > Vektor 3? I see it all of the time. i have a 1.5 GHZ Mac mini with
> > 512 MB RAM. Not a powerhouse, but I don't expect CPU to go 100% when
> > doing permanent analysis.
>
> Why ever not? Chess engines will use as much CPU as is given to them
> and there's nothing wrong with having 100% CPU utilization. If you
> want to do something else with the machine, the scheduler will tune
> down the chess program a bit. MacOS X has pre-emptive multitiasking:
> it's not like you're using Windows 3.1 or something.
>
> If you're unhappy with the high performance you get by having your
> 1.5GHz processor being used at 100%, I suggest you replace it with a
> 1.4GHz unit and pretend that it's the 1.5GHZ chip running at 93%. :-)
>
>
> Dave.
>
> --
> David Richerby Impossible Psychotic Goldfish (TM):
> www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ it's like a fish but it wants to kill
> you and it can't exist!

David, thanks for the info. I just wanted to make sure that this was
"normal". It soudns like it is. I have seen on my Windows machine
that 100% CPU usually meant that the process had some problem or was
hung (tight loops or something). In this case it sounds like it is OK
that the app is claiming as much CPU as it can. It's not like I am
seeing a SPBOD (Spinning beachball of death).

David, do you have a Mac and use Vektor, BTW? How do you like it?

Thanks,
John

Date: 09 Aug 2006 17:05:02
From: David Richerby
Subject: Re: Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

jraggio <[email protected] > wrote:
> David, do you have a Mac and use Vektor, BTW?

Sorry, no -- running Windows on Intel.

Dave.

--
David Richerby Psychotic Mouldy Projector (TM):
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ it's like a 16mm film projector but
it's starting to grow mushrooms and
it wants to kill you!

Date: 09 Aug 2006 10:09:33
From: David Richerby
Subject: Re: Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

raggio <[email protected] > wrote:
> Have any of you also experienced CPU spiking to 100 % when running
> Vektor 3? I see it all of the time. i have a 1.5 GHZ Mac mini with
> 512 MB RAM. Not a powerhouse, but I don't expect CPU to go 100% when
> doing permanent analysis.

Why ever not? Chess engines will use as much CPU as is given to them
and there's nothing wrong with having 100% CPU utilization. If you
want to do something else with the machine, the scheduler will tune
down the chess program a bit. MacOS X has pre-emptive multitiasking:
it's not like you're using Windows 3.1 or something.

If you're unhappy with the high performance you get by having your
1.5GHz processor being used at 100%, I suggest you replace it with a
1.4GHz unit and pretend that it's the 1.5GHZ chip running at 93%. :-)

Dave.

--
David Richerby Impossible Psychotic Goldfish (TM):
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ it's like a fish but it wants to kill
you and it can't exist!

Date: 09 Aug 2006 11:47:59
From: Dave (from the UK)
Subject: Re: Vektor 3 Spikes my CPU

David Richerby wrote:

> Why ever not? Chess engines will use as much CPU as is given to them
> and there's nothing wrong with having 100% CPU utilization. If you
> want to do something else with the machine, the scheduler will tune
> down the chess program a bit. MacOS X has pre-emptive multitiasking:
> it's not like you're using Windows 3.1 or something.
>
> If you're unhappy with the high performance you get by having your
> 1.5GHz processor being used at 100%, I suggest you replace it with a
> 1.4GHz unit and pretend that it's the 1.5GHZ chip running at 93%. :-)
>
>
> Dave.
>

He also has the option of changing the 'nice' value of a process on a
UNIX system (which I think OSX is). After finding the process ID (say
28342 for example) he could issue something like:

$ renice 10 28342

to increase the nice value to 10 and so reduce the priority of the chess
program. But if there is nothing else needing the CPU, the chess program
will still get close to 100% of the CPU.

I suspect OSX will have some fancy GUI that can change the nice value
(priority) of processes.

The manual page for renice on my system (not OSX I might add) is below.
The SYNOPSIS looks quite confusing, but the command I showed above is
the simplest and will work well. The DESCRIPTION explains it pretty well.

-- renice man page from a Solaris (UNIX) system --

User Commands renice(1)

NAME
renice - alter priority of running processes

SYNOPSIS
renice [-n increment] [-i idtype] ID...

renice [-n increment] [-g